Can you hear the Nightingales sing?

In almost exactly a month from now, the first Nightingales to have returned to southern England from their wintering grounds in the lush forests of East Africa will be starting to fill the hawthorn thickets and rides around Lodge Hill and Chattenden Woods on the Hoo Peninsular with their astounding song. But they won’t be aware that the future of the site, one of the single most important locations in the country for a species which nationally declined 60% between 1995 and 2009, hangs in the balance.

For several years now, Lodge Hill has been the subject of a massive new 700ha development by Medway Council and Land Securities; a development amounting to 5000 new homes (the biggest single one in Europe) and countless other amenities being dumped slap bang in the middle of the Hoo Peninsular - a predominantly rural area, rich in wildlife, history and community values. It is a thorughly miserbale concept. But when plans for the development were scrutinised, local conservation groups reacted with the urgency you would expect, going to great lengths to point out the value of this site for nightingales and other wildlife. Their pleas were backed up by the results of the BTO’s 2012 Nightingale survey that showed the area to hold a fantastic 84 pairs of Nightingales, more than previously thought - with 69 inside the boundary directly affected by the development.

Yesterday (Thursday), after many months of hard work behind the scenes, an important decision was made by Natural England. They awarded Lodge Hill SSSI status on account of its important mosaic of habitats, specifically ancient, semi-natural woodland and tracts of neutral (unimproved) grassland and its importance for breeding nightingales. This decision extends the current SSSI boundary of Chattenden Woods, creating a new area of 222ha. This is a great result, it’s the right decision and while it the issue won’t go away overnight, it will now presumably make things much harder for the developers.

“It is an offence for any person intentionally or recklessly to destroy or damage the special features of the SSSI or to disturb any of the fauna”

What’s especially encouraging about this decision is that in October 2012, Natural England initially turned down the chance to notify the contested land as a SSSI “at this stage” on the grounds of “good but incomplete evidence”, referring to an issue with the 1999 national nightingale census. I think this shows a fair and diligent approach to the evidence since presented. If Land Securities and Medway Council were concerned by the open-ended nature of this initial statement (and they were) it would have been interesting to be in their offices yesterday don’t you think?!

On the BBC News last night Councillor Jane Chitty, overseeing Strategic Development and Economic Growth in Medway, lamented those pesky nightingales, moaning “is the priority to protect 80 nightingales or is it more important to provide housing?”. That may be a laughably cynical attempt at riling up public feeling ('it's only a few birds') but what she’s missing here is that this isn’t really about 80 nightingales at all, it’s about all those next year and the year after, securing the future of one the most important sites for the species in England. As the designation states, it’s about recognising important habitats, preserving those invertebrate-rich grasslands and so much more. It’s not a case of ‘Birds v Houses’ as the media wants to sell it, the right to provide homes is not being denied; it’s about respect for the environment, logic and protecting something that can't be replaced - a site we should be proud of. 

I don’t think there is any mitigation that can adequately account for Lodge Hill - despite a ‘biodiversity offsetting’ (shudder) scoping report in November 2012 suggesting it is ‘technically feasible’ to adequately offset expected losses to nightingale populations with habitat elsewhere. The amount of habitat required was cautiously suggested by BTO experts to amount to 300-400ha, assuming certain key habitat conditions were in place (!) That’s a lot of land for Kent - meaning lots of smaller sites scattered across the county, many requiring a lot of work (and time) to make them suitable. Do you think offsetting on this scale could work? Perhaps it might on a smaller scale in some situations, but surely the RISK here just too great to mess with? There is clearly something very important about this site to this particular species - what if it doesn't work? 

As I understand, Medway Council and Land Securities now have 4 months to challenge the decision and they will no doubt have been preparing for this outcome so I guess we shouldn’t pop the champagne corks just yet. Personally I'm sick of seeing our countryside filled in by lazy developments and the thought of seeing a whole new town of characterless, unsustainable and over-priced homes, makes me angry; but I’m not blind to the fact that we’re all living too long and we need new places to live. Of course there are other sites where you can build more houses in Medway if you must, without depriving future generations of an important, iconic part of their natural heritage. Lodge Hill may have looked like an easy option, brownfield, picturesque, commutable, but it’s time for a more constructive, sensitive plan B now – leave Lodge Hill to those ’80’ nightingales and all the other little wonders that call it home.

Nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos)
Source: Andreas Eichler [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Protect Lodge Hill